dngoldman 's review for:

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

4.25

medium-paced

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Acceptance, the third book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, weaves together the claustrophobic weirdness of Annihilation and the corporate suffocation of Authority, while introducing new perspectives that deepen and complicate our understanding of the mysterious landscape of Area X. At different times, it is a deeply unsettling tale of first contact, a meditation on death, an exploration of obsession and loss, and a horrifying encounter with an intelligence far greater—and far stranger—than our own. 

 

The novel employs a familiar speculative fiction trope: intersecting storylines. 

• The lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans, before the formation of Area X.
• Control and Ghost Bird’s journey through present-day Area X.
• The former director’s experiences leading up to the twelfth expedition.
• Grace Stevenson’s survival on a mysterious island, which intersects with Ghost Bird and Control.

 VanderMeer resists neatly braiding these strands. Although much is revealed, the mystery of Area X remains far from resolved. This is deliberate. VanderMeer attempts a delicate trick: telling a story not about knowledge and understanding—the usual aim of books written by rational, non-insane people—but about the impossibility of knowing, the failure of human language and intelligence to encompass something utterly alien.
 

 
Language fails because it cannot hold the boundaries we impose on reality.“Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.” Indeed, the babbling inscriptions scattered across Area X begin to make sense in light of the lighthouse keeper’s eventual surrender to its transformations.
 
 

The storylines unfold across different times—and all times—breaking down our conventional understanding of chronology. In Area X, time moves at its own rate: what appears to be decomposition may actually be accelerated age. At the novel’s end, the lighthouse keeper envisions scenes from across the entire trilogy:
 

• A flowering plant that could never die.
• A reign of white rabbits cut off in mid-leap.
• A woman reaching down to touch a starfish in a tidal pool.

These visions function as a scorecard for the collapse of the foundations of reality—time, form, and even identity itself.


 
One of the most compelling aspects of Acceptance is its exploration of identity in the face of radical change. Through Ghost Bird—the duplicate of the biologist—and the lighthouse keeper’s transformation, VanderMeer asks what remains of the self when reality itself becomes negotiable. The biologist’s copy carries fragments of her predecessor’s memories, while the “real” biologist has transformed into something monstrous, airborne, and alien.
 

 
“The world we are part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can but acceptance moves past denial and maybe there's defiance in that too.”
 

 
These closing lines encapsulate VanderMeer’s point and feel chillingly resonant in 2025. Our world, too, seems strange and unfamiliar, not unlike the totality of the Area X experience. We struggle against forces we cannot fully comprehend. As VanderMeer reminds us: “The only solution to environment is neglect that requires our demise.” In many ways, it already feels like we are living through that demise.z